


In Memoriam

by brighterthansunshine



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-27
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2018-02-22 20:43:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2521160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brighterthansunshine/pseuds/brighterthansunshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Fitz,' she says, beside him, and he startles. She hands him a cup of tea, like this is whoopdle-dee normal and like she doesn't have a new haircut with highlights or like his hands can actually get the cup onto the window ledge without some of it spilling onto the saucer. Jemma jangles a ziploc bag of his medicine beside his ear, and he feels himself slowly shattering down the middle, like a hairline crack across glass. </p>
<p>-</p>
<p>Spoilers up to 2x05</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Memoriam

_  
She’s still moving me to a softer place._

-

Leo waits twenty minutes after the lab clears out before turning out the lights -- habit. He heads up the stairs shakily because his hand can't grip the bannister properly, and looks out at the fading lights of the city (Barcelona, it is quite beautiful) in the distance, a brief wingtip passing by -- habit. May stares at him from the opposite side of the room, the right side of her face quirked up in a half-smile that relaxes Leo, but he scowls, because he's still hurting. Nothing about her shifts, and Leo feels inexplicably angry -- quickly becoming a habit, too. So he turns on the balls of his feet before he starts to yell at her about nothing again.

Mack is sitting in his bunk, and Leo makes a u-turn as he slides his card back into his wallet.

Mack is friendly, like always, and his smile lifts up on both sides, which makes Leo feels like less of a freak and more of a human being. His fingers shake because they always do, these days, and also because he's thinking that what he tried to do to Ward maybe makes him more of a freak than he thinks.

'Sup.' Mack backs up further in his bed and rumples up his bedsheets to give Leo a square of mattress to sit on. Even as Leo sits, he scrunches up different corners of the mattress with his hands. Leo is silent for a while, and he can see Mack's eyes glaze over very slowly and subtly, trying still to give Leo his attention. Leo thinks he's probably thinking about how to fix the hole in the coding that Leo keeps messing up, because people keep reporting seeing a small black square floating around above the air. Leo leaves messes for everyone to clean these days, and it's frustrating, but Mack always laughs and says something about _the fallibility in us all_.

But Leo is supposed to be less fallible. He's the best of the best, which is why he's in SHIELD. Because they needed him, his perfect resume and the way his mind zoomed through their questions at the interview panel, because he is really _really_ smart.

Leo looks down at his hands again.

'I tried to kill someone.' 

Mack's eyes widen a bit, but he's still calm and quietly sure, and that gives Leo pause not to run out and hide himself in his room.

'Hm?' Mack reminds Leo of Jemma a lot, but he twitches less and is more enthusiastic about X-box. And Physics.

'Ward. In the basement, while they were... they were..'

'Keeping him?'

'Yes. That day, when I questioned him, I tried to -- because he -- he made me have this --'

Mack is still regarding him patiently, and not in the way everyone looks at him, like he's a small, broken child.

'Hypoxia. So I.. I adjusted the -- the pressure. B-but I. I turned it off before-- be- before.'

Leo can pinpoint the exact moment that realization dawns on Mack's face, and he feels himself let out a breath when there's no horror in Mack's eyes, or anything else, really, but a hand on his shoulder.

'Do you think you're a bad person, Fitz?'

_Yes_.

Leo shrugs.

Mack smiles, then, and Leo feels that he knows what Mack's going to say. 

'It's the fallibility in us all.'

-

Skye springs a hug on him while he's sleeping crooked in an armchair in the middle of the plane. When he pries his eyes open, he sees her bangs askew from the movement and her arms looping away from his chest.

Skye is terribly ineloquent, in that wonderful way that Leo understood even before all of this. Because his vocabulary is expansive, but Leo was always limited in different ways, hidden under sarcasm and a streak of lashing out.

'You're healing,' she says, simply.

He doesn't quite smile, but feels that she may understand as he takes her hand and presses it between his palms for a brief moment, and then drops it as if it'd hardly happened at all.

He finds a cup of hot chocolate on his bench in the lab (which is awful, really, think of the bacteria), and Skye's messy scrawl across a bright yellow post-it. There's the one labelled "Abandoned draft" with him and a monkey, which is actually really cute. Underneath her name is a drawing of a hand, Fitz's hand, holding a spanner. It's remarkably still.

-

When Jemma comes back, Leo's angry.

He's not sure if the anger is at himself, because he is _so damn useless_ , or because she'd left him and gone away so quietly and returned the same way.

They don't talk for the whole day.

He sits with his knees curled up into his chest by the window, his favourite spot now, and watches the same lights over the city fade into a small, technicoloured blur.

'Fitz,' she says, beside him, and he startles. She hands him a cup of tea, like this is whoopdle-dee normal and like she doesn't have a new haircut with highlights or like his hands can actually get the cup onto the window ledge without some of it spilling onto the saucer. Jemma jangles a ziploc bag of his medicine beside his ear, and he feels himself slowly shattering down the middle, like a hairline crack across glass.

The night has faded to black now, but he stares resolutely out the window as she settles herself across him.

'Fitz,' it takes everything not to be drawn to that voice, even now.

'Jemma.'

She sighs, exasperated, and this is it, now, again. Her being frustrated and him being frustrating -- habit.

Then she puts her hand on his, covers it as much as she can, and wills him to look at her.

He does.

And she is still warm, as she always is, like the quiet lights so far below them.

And Leo still loves her, as he always has.

(Fact.)

**Author's Note:**

> LOL @ me originally planning for this to be a 100 word piece. Title (and quote) taken from In Memoriam by Leo Dangel.


End file.
